'The World'

CHICAGO (AFP) – John McCain and Barack Obama's campaigns swapped accusations of rampant and widespread voter fraud Friday as legal battles over who ought be allowed to cast a ballot ensnared the race to the White House.

An estimated nine million new voters have registered for the hotly contested November 4 election, and the Obama campaign says Democratic registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.

The McCain campaign contends that an untold number of those registration forms are false and warned that illegally cast ballots could alter the results of the election and undermine the public's faith in democracy.

The Obama campaign's top lawyer, Bob Bauer, accused Republicans of recklessly "plotting" to suppress legitimate votes and to "sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for millions of Americans."

Republicans have launched a slew of lawsuits aimed at preventing false ballots from being cast, the most high-profile an attempt to challenge as many as 200,000 of the more than 600,000 new registrations submitted in the battleground state of Ohio.

That challenge was blocked by a Supreme Court ruling Friday.

Republicans said their fears were confirmed when investigations were launched last week in several states in the wake of revelations that the liberal-leaning community organization ACORN had submitted false voter registrations.

McCain said Wednesday the group is "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

A day later, senior officials at the Justice Department told reporters that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating whether ACORN had systematically encouraged the creation of false registrations forms.

Bauer said the leak was a "brazen" violation of department policy not to discuss ongoing investigations, and accused Republicans of once again politicizing the Justice Department in an attempt to influence the election and "create an environment of fear and intimidation."

He said the matter should be turned over to a special prosecutor currently investigating allegations that US attorneys were fired by the Bush administration for failing to bring indictments of voter fraud and public corruption in the leadup to the 2006 election.

"What we're seeing is an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bauer said. "Nobody really expects thousands of Mickey Mouses or Tony Romos to show up at the poll and vote this fall."

ACORN, which has been a driving force in increasing voter registration among younger and low-income minorities, dismissed allegations of wrongdoing and said it was responsible for alerting election officials to the bulk of the suspect registrations.

ACORN said a standard internal review found that as many as 13,000 of the 1.3 million new voter registrations it collected could be false and blamed canvassers who were trying to get paid without bothering to sign up new voters.

To affect the election, those records would have to pass a screening process and people would have to succeed in voting with those false names, which is a serious crime and incredibly rare.

A 2007 study by the New York University School of law concluded that "it is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

But McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said even a small margin of voter fraud could change such a close election, particularly given that several states picked the president by a margin one percent or less in the past two elections.

"I don't think anybody at this time has any sense of how big this fraud has been," he told reporters on a conference call.

"It only takes a very little to undermine the public's credibility that these elections were honest, open and fair."

Davis also attacked Obama for failing to disclose his full relationship with the group - something McCain's running mate Sarah Palin highlighted on the campaign trail Friday - and said the scandal has cast a "cloud of suspicion" over the election.

"We think John McCain is going to win this election and we don't want a pall cast on it and I hope that the Obama people the day after the election understand we did everything we could to shine that the bright light of public scrutiny on all these issues," Davis added.